"I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work. So I called him at home and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry and so I texted to his cell and now you just have to go around checking all these portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. Its exhausting." - Some clip from the movie "He's Just Not That Into You".
I was recently un-friended on Facebook.
My feelings started to be affected by the sentimentality of this particular action. Since being someone's online friend or fan doesn't necessarily warrant you to be a true friend, I started wondering about the values attached to these online friends. As in what the varying degrees of online familiarity are really meant to represent.
Defining online friendships:
I have friends online that I have never met. I like them. They like me. We connect because we may have similar interests, like music, art, Dj's, school, a video game...whatever.
I am friends with people who do not know me in any capacity at all but they want me to support them, like promoters, musicians, sales-people and other writers.
I am also friends with people who I met once in my life or are school mates from years ago, and we connect online to either relive those memories or keep in touch, but either way they are clearly not relevant in my current life.
Then there are the homies. People we love and can't live without, they are in the mix too. But we don't really depend on the online relativity and correspondence to maintain these relationships unless we are separated from these people by distance.
Lastly, there are the romantic interests...And we are going to talk about this.
Online romance or romances that spill over on to the internet, are precarious and volatile.
They are doomed because of the inadvertent way we perceive actions and/or non-action in the cyber world. Having a lover as a Facebook friend, means I end up being privy to things I would not otherwise know or think about had it not been for these terribly interpretive phenomenons. And hiding everything is suspicious. And breaking up is ridiculous on account of having to watch, deliberately or otherwise your thwarted/pined upon lover live out their existence online. (possibly with other people). It is exhausting. And its torture. Unless you delete each other. But how does that happen? Do you have a conversation about it? Do you talk about it, so both of you know what it means? Do you negotiate what is relevant to the dynamics of your newly expounded upon relationships or freedoms? See all of this...these questions and notions of how to deal, are contingent on sophisticated views of communication between lovers. Its highly unlikely.
But when rejection hits a nerve...when all of these things become relevant to our feelings and we become concerned, there is no way things end well. They can't, they won't, they don't. And some of us end up looking crazy! From online msg, sms, email, voicemail, written letter form and the grapevine.
There are now just too many ways to tell someone its over than the most honest and respectful one...face to face.
I'm just saying.
What do you think?
I remember being a teenager without texting or wireless, and no World Wide Web. People still found ways to be evasive, to dilute and mediate communication.
ReplyDeleteIt appears easier now, but that's not really true. Accountability and agency are things neither side in a dialogue can deny.
There are plenty of devices and networks, but everything has an "off" switch. Important conversations still require face-to-face. If there are things you don't want to see, filter the network.
Layers of technology only complicate life if you let them. The problem, such as it is...remains human nature, not technology. As for rejection, real or perceived...we don't have devices for working through that. ;)